ABSTRACT
Sports and card games are, as Huizinga observed, very old. The Olympics began
in 776 BC and such a festival of formal sport must have built on even older
traditions of running races and throwing contests. The pack of cards that we use
now in the West dates back to medieval times. Koreans played card games before
the Greeks and the Romans were addicted to all kinds of games. In a nice phrase,
Sutton Smith (1983) has written of a human instinct ‘to game’.
